


Spine You've Been Saving For His Mattress

by glitterandrocketfuel



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Angst, Fairytale Retellings, I can't believe that last one was an actual tag, M/M, Pining, The Princess and the Pea Elements, Van Days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 02:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterandrocketfuel/pseuds/glitterandrocketfuel
Summary: Scene prince Pete is Missing Notes, and if he can’t find them, he’ll never find the Sound, and the Scene that is his kingdom will fall. A fairytale layering "The Princess and the Pea" over the formation of the band. Liberties have been taken with canon and with the fairytale, too.





	Spine You've Been Saving For His Mattress

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PlatinumAndPercocet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlatinumAndPercocet/gifts).



> This one goes out to PlatinumandPercocet, who encouraged me at the time I most needed it. Your encouragement came at the time I usually bottom out in my writing process, and it's nice not to have a bruised rear end because a friend was there to slide a mattress under me before I hit the pavement. I give you all the good things.
> 
> Special huge thanks to @rainbowmatic-stumpomatic on tumblr for the beautiful and amazingly inspiring moodboards!

 

Scents of sweat and smoke filled the bar, along with thrashing bodies and stale, sticky beer. Pete hunched over the microphone like a goblin curled around a shiny coin, his lips brushing the metal mesh as he screamed out his pain in time with the frenetic guitars and pounding beat of the drum kit behind him. He moved to the front of the stage and began the chorus, chasing the music with words scratched harsh out onto rumpled notebook paper, then scratched out and changed again--

And there it was.

The missed note.

Nothing you'd notice, in a screaming crowd of scene kids, unless you were Scene Royalty. And Pete, with his guyliner and too-tight jeans and dyed, spiked hair, was King of the Scene as surely as if he'd been crowned and carried a scepter instead of a microphone.

The note missed, and the song fell flat.

Not flat enough that the kids didn't jump or the bouncers didn't need to pick a few up by the scruffs of their necks and haul them back two feet, but the song lay heavy on the back of his tongue, thick like pewter and just as eventually deadly in its dull density.

This band, too, would die of it, leaving Pete alone again, a king without a country.

"I'm telling you, man," Joe says to him later, through a blue haze of the remnants of a halfway decent night where halfway decent wasn't quite enough. "Hardcore's getting too hard core."

This he said while ruffling his bleached-blond curls that clashed with his dark and luxuriant eyebrows with the same hand that held the cherry-coal tipped end of a blunt he'd just stolen from a dude who brushed by and mumbled, "faggot," at Pete around the joint stuck to his bottom lip. 

Pete would have aimed for the asshole's junk and given it a twist and a squeeze that brought tears to everyone he'd inflicted thus far (some out of confused, repressed, half-sweaty unexpected fantasies because Pete had that effect on people). 

But Joe simply grabbed the guy by the face and shoved him against a wall and when his hand came away, the butt was caught between two fingers of Joe's right hand, while his left propelled the guy down the hall. "Fuck off, loser, he's not that into you," Joe said, loudly enough to be heard by half the bar.

To Pete, he said, "Let's blow this scene and do something fun."

_But I'm king of the scene, Pete thought. Am I not fun? Do I not preside over the nightly revelries in my twisted court?_ "Fun, huh? Like what kind of fun?"

Joe shrugged. "I dunno. You've got enough bad relationships in the tank that we could, dunno, make fun songs about your break-ups instead of screaming songs about your exes?" He motioned with the blunt leaving a trail of blue-hazed smoke through the air between them, aiming it at the group of twats at the hallway entrance getting more belligerent around a pair about to start throwing hands. "This? This ain't my scene."

Pete squinted. The ruckus swelled and he grabbed Joe by the shirt and swung the younger boy around towards the back entrance. "Yeah. It's more of an arms race." He flung himself into the seat and winced as something that felt like a square rock dug right into the meat of his ass cheek. He fished out the offending presence-- _how did one of his notebooks get in Joe's car?_ \--and flipped open to a blank page and scrawled those last few lines he and Joe had said. They'd be important someday. When he could show these notebooks to someone worth showing.

**

Andy is more sympathetic to Pete's missing notes than Joe is. Joe thinks Pete is paranoid from the stress of his college classes. Andy knows Pete is on A Quest, because the crown never rests comfortably on the brow that hasn't earned it (which is one reason that royalty through bloodline is a stupid idea in his mind. Some princes shouldn't become kings).

"I told you, man--I've got obligations," he tells Pete for the eight hundredth time when the other asks him to join his as-yet-undefined new band.

"You will be mine, Hurley," Pete says through a grin. "One day, you _will_ be mine."

Andy smirks. "Tell you what--you find that sound I can't drum holes right through, and I'll think about it."

"Just you wait, Andy Hurley." Pete promises, but Andy? He knows Pete--has known Pete for years. And he knows Pete well enough to see the parts where the roof has flown off, and the cracks in him where the weather gets in. Pete hides in plain sight, his armor operating under the aegis that the more he is exposed, the greater his protections. But Pete's problem was never being naked for the world, it was stripping for the people who mattered. And Pete couldn't decide who mattered enough to see him without his armor.

Because as Pete is King of the Scene, Andy is charged with keeping the True Beat. And the True Beat can only happen if _all_ the music is there. A king with missing notes is no king at all. If he can't hold all the music, he'll never be able to keep the True Beat.

**

Joe, however, is no court wizard. He's an ax-man, a shredder more at home with power chords and riffs to slice through the air and stake down the borders of a kingdom for his monarch. The power of his chords complicates things. When mixed with the notes missing from King Pete's grasp it causes him to shift into a state of Trohmania, a whirling dervish of an attack that sets the enemies of The Scene to trembling and shakes the foundation of the castle right down to the weaknesses of its Chicago Softcore foundation.

Pete knows he can be a good king, so he sends Joe out on a Quest of his own after they've gone through their second drummer and a guitarist who seemed more interested in having the King of the Scene open doors to the Recording Studios for him than anything involving them as a band. Pete's decided they need a singer instead of another guitarist with too much ego (Pete's got that covered, thank you very much) and not enough self-respect to keep Pete from singing.

So he scratches his words down in his notebook and stuffs it under his mattress when it's full. He buys another one and starts filling the pages with the chicken-scratch of Royal Decrees when _She_ stops taking his calls because even the king cannot compel a princess who isn't a subject, and he wouldn't want to, anyway. He wants her to understand his hurt, not make her hurt worse than he does. So he commits to the page instead of the play.

They borrow a singer from Patterson who's a pretty chill dude. He sits in on a few practices and catches the music quickly enough, but the now-battered notebook that Pete keeps sliding into his bass case remains at the bottom, underneath a package of picks and a coil of E-string and something that might have been a granola bar before succumbing to pressure equivalent to a torture chamber's press. 

They play a frat party over the state line in Milwaukee. On his throne of an amp stack, Pete flips his bass strap over his shoulder and hands it down to Chris as Joe's riffs grow more frantic. Pete turns around and falls into the waiting arms of the crowd.

And the note isn't there.

The singer's gamely keeping up, the crowd hasn't dropped Pete, the beat is only a little off. But a shoulder is digging into the small of Pete's back. The pen he shoved in his back pocket in the hopes of signing some breasts gives between the heel of somebody's hand and the bony part of his ass and he feels wet ink spreading along the right side of his jeans. His feet are higher than his head. He's not moving on the crowd so much as being tossed around in it. He lands on one hand and a knee, jumping up quickly to dash back to the stage where nobody is jumping in sync with anyone else.

They're all lone rangers, dancing to a different beat.

Two more shows, just as small, in basements just as shitty, with singers who have potential. Another chill dude. A girl whose lipstick Pete borrows for his lips and washes off his dick later on. Her voice is husky and sweet (both onstage and off), but she glides smooth over lyrics and it's almost--almost--like the missing notes don't matter because she's soft and wet and warm when he presses her up against the wall and completely oblivious to the notes that are absent from the places inside him.

"We're still missing it, dude," Joe says, lying on the roof of his mother's beat-up minivan. "It's like I know it's there, just out of reach."

Pete shifts, uncomfortable, the aerodynamic molding of the roof line digging into his back and another pen snaps under his butt and now he owes his sister yet another pair of jeans.

Pete is driven by heart and soul and words spill out of his mouth and from his hands (while ink seems to be pouring from his right butt-cheek and all the Axe body spray in the world can't cover up the scent of _Betrayal by Sharpie_ ), but Joe is a doer, not a thinker. When he shreds, his fingers move over frets, but he throws his hips into it, his legs with strong thighs pushing back on the instrument to send the music in the right direction. His legs carry him all over town, beyond the local hangouts where the scene kids spend their time, the lords and ladies of the rain-soaked paper banners with the transient names of bands hand-lettered beneath badly-reproduced venue logos.

Thus, the axe-wielding warrior found himself in the great library, absent his weapon of choice, at the Borders of the kingdom, in a discussion with one of the denizens On The Outs--out _skirts_ , out _sides_ , out _siders_ , still orbiting but far from the white-hot center of the Scene, out in the suburbs where the music only sometimes reached, about _Neurosis_. 

The archives of the great library are no place for this sort of discourse, so it shouldn't surprise Joe that he's met with an ambush. "Well, _actually_...Neurosis clearly doesn't belong there. Their stylistic choices clearly make them more at home over--" The newcomer swoops in, using a surprise move for which Joe has no defense. "-- _here_."

"'Scuse me?" Joe challenges this newcomer, this outsider whose lofty proclamations are wafting up from the bottom of a Well, Actually (although Joe the Axe Man is unfamiliar with the nomenclature of that particular rhetorical move, he does recognize a siege maneuver when he sees one).

Instead of meeting toe-to-toe and pick-to-pick with a fellow warrior, he's parried by a bookish-looking hipster. A not-so-humble monk of musical gatekeeping whose opening move was only the first in a sustained volley consisting of mostly an aggressive knowledge display and an impressive lexicon to back it up. Joe could barely keep up with the incantations of incarnations of scene bands that had manifested and been banished in about the same amount of time as the cleric's mentions of them in the verbal sparring-session. Finally, Joe called a halt to things. "So I'm starting a band with a friend. You know what I can do, and he's not bad, either. It's gonna be Scene, but it's gonna be _fun_ , y'know? You in?"

Joe's opponent straightened his glasses, considered his next move, then finally nodded. "Yeah, I could take a crack at it. I've got some stuff I've been working on."

"Good. We're looking for a drummer, a rhythm guitarist, and a singer."

His sparring partner took his hand and inscribed numbers and letters on the back of it like glyphs. "Then look here. Saturday at six. I'm free then."

**

"Come, my lord, to the vast wilderness of Glenview," Joe declared upon returning to the castle that was Pete's dump of an apartment. His courtiers--roommates who sometimes paid into the bills and sometimes got their pizza and clean socks stolen in recompense, for the king shall have his due--scattered at Joe's arrival.

"Dude, what the fuck would we wanna do that for?" Tim asked. 

Keith just scooted down the hall towards one of the bedrooms. "Sorry, gotta , uh, give my goldfish a bath."

Pete raised one eyebrow over an artfully-lined eye and on Saturday, they're walking up the front steps of a modest cottage on the outskirts of the kingdom and the cleric stands before them in strange heraldry and welcomed them with a scowl.

"Dude, argyle?" Pete laughed and maybe fell a little in love as he entered the abode and followed the stranger down into the dungeon, where the many implements of his craft were assembled.

The king sat upon a lofty, pillowed couch (that sagged in the middle) and his trusty axe-man sat next to him. "Play us something, Pat."

"Do not take my name in vain. It's Patrick." He wears Buddy Holly glasses and Pete's pretty sure he cuts his own hair, but he's charmed.

Pete's royal eyebrows went up. "Okay, then, Patrick. Show us what you got."

Pete listened to Patrick's oeuvre. Next to him, Joe nodded along. Pete closed his eyes and let the truth of the music into him--the beat was solid, but not True (Andy bore that power alone). 

Then Patrick took up the guitar.

He started with covers--Saves the Day, Green Day. Pete began to hear something underneath.

"You wanna hear him sing more," Joe said. It was a statement, not a question. Pete nodded. Joe spoke again. "Play the next one."

"So, uh, this one's an original."

Pete slitted his eyes enough to see Patrick take a nervous hand to the bridge of his nose to push up his glasses. A fine sheen of sweat peeked out from beneath the kid's bangs as he took up the guitar again.

That was when Pete fell all the way. He caught the notes coming from the kid's throat in golden motes, chasing them through the air through the filter of his eyelashes. His ears picked up the repetitions, the chord progressions, the leaps from lows to highs and the counterpoints the guitar only hinted at. Pete tilted his head back and let the notes cascade over him, working their way into his ears and into his brain, finding the crevices and the nooks where light couldn't reach. 

Then the song stopped. He lifted his head.

"I'm stronger on the harmony on this, but the song, like, _calls_ for it, y'know."

Pete stared at him, but spoke to Joe.  "I think this guy should sing."

**

Being King of the Scene, it turned out, did not guarantee that one's Royal Decrees worked on Outlanders from the Suburban Wilds, because Patrick balked at singing. It took three tries to get Patrick to sing, with Joe helping along in between practices. Finally, Pete had to crown him with an old knit hat that he'd originally stolen from his sister.

But from under that hat, falling from those lips, came a cascade of music. Notes. _So many notes_. They filled the air around Pete, spilling into the cracks and crevices and the shadows of the space they inhabited together. Rehearsals became shows. Shitty basement shows and half-filled venues full of apathetic patrons who didn't give two shits about a nameless opening act but still gave Pete a rush just to play up there, next to Patrick and Joe.

Knee deep in music, Pete was certain it was enough and summoned Andy to himself again. "Listen to him," Pete said. "Can you believe him?"

But Andy smiled gently and shook his head. "He's got potential. You're making something. What, I'm not sure."

"Come on," Pete said, still not quite willing to attempt to order Andy. Royalty or no, flashing the crown wasn't a tool you pulled out of your arsenal for just any occasion.

"Pete." Andy put a hand on his shoulder. "You're still missing something." Kind eyes gave him an assessing once-over. "There's something that still...doesn't commit."

"Yeah, it's all the drummers that aren't you," Pete retorted. " _They're_ the ones who aren't committing."

"You know it's not that."

"Those drummers aren't you, Andy." Pete nudged his longtime friend. "Nobody keeps the beat like you."

"That's because I never half-ass my beats. They come from heart and soul." Andy nodded in Patrick's general direction. "You got the soul there, but--"

Pete thought he knew what Andy was saying. He hadn't won Patrick's heart. Not really. The melodies were catchy enough to tap his fingers against his thighs and nod his head but the lyrics didn't quite fit. 

Pete reached for his notebook at the next practice, but Patrick had put down his guitar and was arguing about whether a chord progression belonged in a major third or a minor seventh. Patrick's face was red and his expression mutinous while Joe's face just went more and more expressionless, which Pete knew was just him storing energy for the inevitable explosion.

A good king arbitrated disputes between his subjects. He stepped between the two other boys, the notebook rolled up and held between them like the mighty scepter of justice. "Hey, let's figure this out next time, okay?"

Patrick tugged his hat down over his eyes. "Whatever. Listen, I can't be here tomorrow. I have a Thing."

"A Thing?" Pete asked, his hand dropping to his side.

Patrick looked away. "Yeah, a Thing."

_No no no, you can't have a Thing!_ People who had a _Thing_ ended up being _eaten up_ by the Thing. Pete looked under the hat and into Patrick's eyes, moody like a moat without a drawbridge to breach the castle walls of Patrick Stumph. The notebook slipped out of his hand. Patrick, slipping out of his grasp. "Okay," he said, his voice small and sinking into the depths where the sea monsters lurked.

When Patrick left, Pete turned to Joe. "We need better music all around," he said. "We're just not...grand enough. Big enough." 

Joe was skeptical, because how big did you need to be to play basements and all-ages fire halls and frat parties, but he understood what Pete meant in an academic sense, so he found them another guitarist that could play the rhythm parts that Patrick had started writing into their songs. 

With Patrick gone from practice, Pete lay on the couch while Joe showed TJ the rhythm parts and let himself be tormented by the lumps of notebook and pen digging into his backside. When Patrick came back, Pete presented TJ to Patrick like a gift. "I got you some harmony," he said, proud of his accomplishment.

Patrick's face shifted into a careful blankness. "Ooo-kay. Um, thanks, I guess?" To TJ, he said, "I'm pretty sure Pete doesn't mean he's actually giving you to me like an action figure."

TJ grinned. "Ehh, it's all good. I've got Kung-Fu Grip."

Patrick laughed like silver floating in through a stained glass window upon a knighting instead of the last rays of the sun coming through the basement window. Pete picked up his bass, suddenly coated in shadows of jealousy he had no business feeling. _Everything the sun touches is the king's, not some cheesehead who's playing a few extra riffs and taking up space on stage_. 

Patrick slung the guitar strap over his shoulder and stepped away from the window and out of the sun's touch.

Pete scowled even harder. "Use that Kung-Fu grip on something else besides your dick. We're burning daylight here."

TJ raised both eyebrows at Pete and shared a look with Patrick that made Pete's insides burn. But they started playing and the music dropped notes from the light beams into the shadows and Pete chased the notes around like a cat chasing dust motes, so close within reach and so slippery to hold.

**

Moving Patrick into his court didn't tighten Pete's grip on him as much as Pete hoped. Now Patrick was close enough to share space (the third bedroom of the apartment he now shared with Joe), but still so far out of reach. And Pete's crown was starting to slip.

"Something isn't right," Patrick said at practice. "Pete, play that bass line again."

Pete, singled out under Patrick's regard, couldn't make his fingers work. It was a bad day anyway, when his fingers were only good for leaving fingerprints and not holding to things. "Sorry, I--sorry," he mumbled.

He felt Patrick's eyes on him but kept his gaze fixed firmly to the floor and the tangle of coiled wires snaking between instruments and amplifiers.

"Pete," TJ said, in open defiance of Pete's station, "Get your shit together, man."

"No, it's cool. I wasn't happy with that anyway. Let's strip it down and simplify it." Patrick moved in behind Pete and put his hands on the bass and Pete wanted to melt, but he was too frozen to do so. "Play it like this. Just the five notes instead of the eight."

"I can get it," Pete said. "I'll practice--"

Patrick shook his head against Pete's back. "No, play it like this. It's a high-energy song and we'll never get that many notes out with all the jumping around you do on stage at a live show. It's better to stick to simple."

It was kind of Patrick to say so, but Pete knew what was underneath. He wasn't good enough to keep up. Not good enough to keep Patrick.

Patrick thought they needed a demo. "I'm only singing because you play my songs," he told Joe one Sunday night after they'd stayed up too late watching _Rushmore_. "I need them on tape before this band self-destructs." 

Pete, lurking in the hallway outside Patrick's bedroom door, overheard, so he went to his shitty job at the sandwich shop and asked for more hours and set the extra money aside for studio time (because being Scene Royalty didn't come with a stipend, all Pete could do was tax his subjects through the till at the sandwich shop). He was, quite frankly, a little miffed about Patrick's assumption that the band was going to break up or implode, and he said as much to Joe. "Are we breaking up?"

"I'll never leave you, my prince," Joe deadpanned.

"No, I mean this band." As an afterthought, Pete chucked Joe under the chin. "You'll always be my number one axe-man, right?"

Joe smirked. "We _are_ sorta spinnin' wheels here. Not that I don't love playing for free beer and deliberate overlooking of my age, but we kinda have to get out of the mud before--"

Dread, an old friend of Pete's from way back, settled behind Pete's ribcage. "Yeah." _Before my reputation catches up to me. I get it, I really do_ , he told himself as he flopped down on his seen-better-days mattress. Pete Wentz, King of the Scene, barely holding on to the crown while Tim went off to college, and the other guys got better jobs, found girlfriends and moved in with them, grew the fuck up instead of just fucking up. While Pete couldn't even charm the heart out of a suburban teenager wearing argyle sweaters and black socks.

He immediately flopped right back up when something stabbed him, low on his back, damn near puncturing the skin next to his tailbone. He flailed for a moment before landing on the floor with a thud, half on a child's Ninja Turtles lunchbox that he dimly remembered "liberating" from Patrick's boxes of stuff because he needed a container for something about that size. "Ow! Mother _fucker!_ "

"Pete?" Patrick's voice drifted in from down the hall, heralding his arrival in the doorway, the beanie perched on his head like a crown of his own--or more like the helm of a knight, keeping his face obscured from the world and his eyes well-protected from anyone who might look too deeply. "What the hell, dude?"

Pete looked up at Patrick from his undignified sprawl on the floor and thought, _he has all the music. My missing notes must be there somewhere_.

He also thought Patrick had blowjob lips, and said that particular quiet part out loud.

Patrick rolled his eyes, still blushing. "Eat a dick, Wentz."

"Yours, Stump. Come over here and let the king show you how its done." His words teased, but the low, steady ache in his gut told him the truth that he'd been aware of since that first glimpse of argyle.

Patrick backed out of the room, his two upturned and waggling middle fingers the last thing Pete saw as Patrick disappeared around the corner. Like a Cheshire Cat, only it was a Cheshire Patrick, disappearing with nothing but a pair of Flipped (love)Birds left behind.

Pete's gut curled in a different manner when the idea of "disappearing Patrick" settled in. There were enough shows under their unnamed belts now that Patrick was starting to be known as "the dude with the voice" and even if the hardcore scene didn't want him, there were other kingdoms that eyed Pete's treasure with avarice. He glared at the bed and saw the thing that originally sent him yelping onto the floor was his battered notebook full of ideas and dreams and witticisms and hateful little _on dits_ towards every ex who'd broken his heart, but that he was too afraid to share with anyone who hadn't sworn fealty to the Crown.

The spiral-bound's end had unbent (okay, Pete had straightened it out to use one night when he wanted to cut words out of the skin of his palms, but things hadn't quite worked out the way he'd imagined, and he couldn't bend the spiral back into place) and was the thing jabbing him in the small of his back. Pete reached around and felt the tiny hole in his shirt, and when he jerked his fingers back from the unexpected sting, they came away smeared with rusty crimson. _So I did bleed after all_.

The thing about the notebook--and all its siblings littering the secret places in his room--was that it was locked up like the crown jewels. Tight and away and only came out for Affairs of State. And currently, the king was not having any affairs whatsoever. His tastes for adoring courtiers--of which there were a fair few--had gone sour. No notes tumbled from their lips when they called him pretty. The glances up from kohl-lined eyes weren't filling the cracked spaces inside him even temporarily. Only the notes did that and the notes all came from Patrick.

_I could lock him in the Tower_. Pete toyed with the idea. But Patrick would sing and the brave knights would pile themselves up high enough to make a ramp up to the window, lured there by his siren song, climbing braids of musical staves and stepping up stairs made of arpeggios to get to him.

Pete didn't even have to climb a tower. He just had to go down the hall. With the notebook.

Pete put the disc from another king--the King of Pop, to be precise--in his CD player and queued up the track. As he'd hoped, Patrick couldn't resist his temptation and his voice filled the apartment, layering over Michael's and sending out borrowed notes that Pete could only pretend belonged to him.

That night, when sleep stayed banished to the wilds outside the kingdom, Pete thrashed in the bedcovers until he heard soft sounds from the room down the hall. " _The way you make me feel...You really turn me on..._ " They weren't yet the missing notes, but instead of flitting away, these notes surrounded him, and if he were very, very still, some of them settled on his skin, just for a time and a brief respite of peace.

**

The following two gigs, Pete threw himself into playing and thrashed around the stage, even going so far as climbing the amp stacks to leap from the tower into the fray, as all good kings led their valiant knights. He stitched together their sound with the sinews of his own strained muscles, his frayed shoelaces, the strings of his bass while the notes out of Patrick's throat sleeted over him in a torrent and slipped through his fingers.

The crowds cared, but they came for blood, not music. Cuts on Pete's forehead where he split his head open diving off the amp stack. A slice across Patrick's eyebrow when Pete spun his bass half a measure off and Patrick wasn't where Pete expected him to be. Blood foaming up from Joe's lip and gums thanks to Patrick's mic stand doing a passable imitation of a spear chucked across the stage when TJ swung out a foot. Joe's Trohmania carrying him in faster and tighter spins across the stages and into walls, glazing his eyes with the mania of it all.

Pete held court at practices and turned up the amps to cover up the holes in the sound. But the holes grew bigger. He stuffed them full of cheap beer and ransomed pizza and finally got them two hours in a cheap studio with an ancient Mac and a few guys with a soundboard one step above Patrick's kit that still looked like it came out of a toy box stamped with Fisher-Price. They played short, fast, and loud, Pete scribbling out his crown-jewel words he'd originally written in favor of paste cut-glass ones, keeping the gold and risking only the copper. Pete put clever aphorisms all over the hand-drawn and photocopied insert into the jewel case of this, the faux costume of his royal treasury, but nothing gold.

But at the end of the day, he sat on a rickety chair and wore a tin crown. 

"Listen, man. There's a lot of energy here, but it's just not going anywhere. I can't be dicking around with high schoolers," TJ said. "There's a couple of guys thinking about doing a metal project. They asked me to sit in."

"Fuck, TJ," Pete said. "You show me somebody more metal than my boy Trohman."

"That's just it--he's your _boy_. He can't go out on a school night. These guys--the Milwaukee scene has a lotta open doors for me."

"Begone, then!" Pete banished him from the Scene. "Never darken my door again."

The next practice, Joe and Patrick met him with confused stares. Pete rubbed his hands together. "We're a trio again." The royal mask was firmly in place, manic grin and desperate hope masquerading as confidence and energetic new direction.

"I'm back on drums?" Patrick asked, hope in his voice. "My kit's ready to go. I was thinking of taking Tim up on his offer to fill in for their band next week. I had to practice anyway."

Pete felt the borders of his kingdom crumbling. Even as Joe rushed to defend them. "Dude, they'll eat you alive."

Patrick scowled at Joe. "I can hold my own."

The unmoored feeling swelled, pouring from all the empty spaces in Pete. This was it--his kingdom slipping away. "Wait--" He reached out, desperate. "You can't--I mean--Just--stay." He held his hand up, palm out towards Patrick, who looked confused and a little uncomfortable. "Right there. Don't move."

Pete darted out of the room, tripping over his own feet to get to his car. He wrenched the door open and tried to ignore the missing notes ringing in his ears with deafening silence. "Where is it, where is it, where _is it?_ " He tore through a scriptorium of empty fast-food wrappers and crumpled napkins, an armory of the dead soldiers of empty soda cans and the royal treasury of loose change caught between the seats to no avail.

Patrick was slipping away from him. With Patrick would go the music, and the spaces inside Pete would empty and he'd be left with nothing. He'd _be_ nothing.

He flung himself into the backseat, dread given way to despair and wondered why he should bother. Patrick would find another place, probably in Tim's band or one of the other baronies ready to declare independence from the Scene. Joe could hold his own--maybe Pete could send him to Milwaukee to usurp TJ's promised position. And maybe Pete--maybe he could haunt Andy again and see if a king without a country still carried the sheen of royalty enough to be allowed to sacrifice himself from atop an amp stack to the fury of the rebellious masses.

"Pete?" The squeak of the screen door to Joe's parents' house heralded Patrick's approach.

Pete flung an arm over his eyes and let his legs dangle out of the back door of the car.

"Pete, what the hell, dude?" Patrick's voice grew softer as he came closer. "Hey--you okay?" His face appeared in the darkness, lit from above by the dome light. His features softened too, Patrick being well-acquainted with the understanding that the crown sometimes weighed heavy upon Pete's flat-ironed brow.

Pete peered at him from behind a screen of rumpled hoodie fabric. "Fine," he mumbled. "Forget it." He inhaled sharp against the cold-hot pain of what he was about to do. "It's cool if Tim's band'll have you. They're--they're gonna go places. He's good people."

"I never said I'd leave our band. They just need a fill-in for a Saturday show. I'm always willing to help out and it's never been a thing before."

"No, it's okay," Pete said with zero conviction behind his words. "You should--you should--don't let me hold you down."

Patrick leaned in, ducking his head to avoid beaning himself on the little coat-hanger thingy snapped to the Oh Shit bar on the car's interior roof. "Pete, why would you think that?"

Pete didn't answer. It was uncomfortable, lying in the backseat of the car surrounded by the crumbling ruin of his kingdom, but it _should_ be uncomfortable, he thought. No one should be rewarded for falling to pieces. "It doesn't matter. I don't--I don't matter. You're good to go, but I'm just...this band seems to be going nowhere fast." Abruptly, he sat up. If his kingdom was going to fall, then he'd go down swinging in its defense. Something dug into his hip. "I'm sorry I couldn't make it golden for you."

"Pete, it's a fill-in," Patrick's tone flattened. "Not the end of the world."

Pete shook his head. "You don't have to pretend. I know I'm not good enough to keep you. Fuck, I was barely good enough to keep Joe. He's too young to know any better."

Patrick surprised him by grabbing his hoodie with both hands and shaking him. _Laying hands on the king is a punishable offense_ , Pete thought. But only if you had an army to back that up, and Pete didn't even have his own self-esteem to come to his defense.

"Listen, you idiot. I did _not_ leave a comfy room where my mom cooks my food and sometimes washes my underwear and I did _not_ move into your dank mess just so you could screw me out of songwriting and make jokes about screwing me but never even follow through."

"I--what? Fuck you--"

Patrick's upper lip curled. "Fuck me yourself, you coward." He pushed Pete back down onto the seat and followed with his full weight. Patrick might be a short dude, but there was a lot of teenage rage packed into a fun-sized package, and the whole thing landed like he'd been launched from a catapult to breach Pete's walls and his ribcage, too. Pete landed on his back with an "oof" of lost air from his lungs, dizzy with the invitation that fell from Patrick's lips and filled him with gold.

Patrick mashed his lips--those wonderful blowjob lips--against Pete's and the king laid down his arms--settled them around Patrick's waist--and let him in.

Before Pete was ready, Patrick drew back and peered down at him, lit harshly in the dome light. "You don't get to leave me with this band just when I'm starting to like it." Patrick shifted his hips and Pete groaned with the promise of it. And something digging into his back. "You also don't get to leave _me_ with this hard-on just when I'm starting to like _you_."

"I came out here--" Pete struggled for the words in between biting assaults from Patrick's lips that he did not object to in the least. "--to find you--I mean--" Pete turned his head, needing to get the confession out more than the kisses in. Patrick seemed to understand, because he backed off, even though the flush of his skin was such that Pete now wanted his royal regalia as King of the Scene to be that exact shade of rosy debauchery.

"I can't pretend to understand how your brain works all the time," Patrick said. "But at least tell me you weren't running away from me."

Pete shook his head. "No. Never that." The thing digging in his hip was driving him crazy and he shifted.

It wasn't the best of ideas, because his crotch rubbed against Patrick's and the shudder that went through Pete showed its twin on Patrick's face. "Then what? Quick, before we have to explain to Mr. and Mrs. Trohman why we're indecent in their driveway."

Pete went full indecent, thrusting back up. Patrick groaned again. "Jesus, Pete, I said--Oh _God_ \--" Patrick ground him back down into the seat and Pete's entire kingdom shrunk to the friction in his jeans when Patrick sighed into his mouth. "Don't stop--please, I--"

"Yeah." Bright-hot pain stabbed his lower back, crashing into warm and heavy pleasure from the front. "Patrick--" He put so much into the name. "PatrickPatrick _Patrick_ \--" He turned his head to the side to bury his face in the crook of Patrick's neck and breathe in his sweat and the scent of music and gold and Patrick. "You're a miracle and I know you're too _good_ for me but I don't want to _lose_ you and I _can't_ let you slip away but I can't _hold on_ and--"

"Pete!" Patrick turned his head and mashed his lips against Pete's, silencing the stream of babble for a hot minute. "I'm gonna--oh, Jesus I'm gonna--" He lifted his head again.

"God, _yes_ \--" Pete's tongue darted out, tasting salt-sweat and leather from Patrick's guitar strap as he met Patrick hip-crash to hip-crash. Whatever had been stabbing him in the back became irrelevant because there was too much Patrick surrounding him.

Then Patrick sang a note and it was the one that Pete had been missing all along. 

It filled him, warm and molten, gold flowing in to fill the cracks where he was broken. He threw his head back, unable to take the weight of it and Patrick's lips and teeth and tongue at his throat, the delicious friction between them, the gold music of Patrick's moan inside him and out and vibrating against his throat shook a release out of him in long, languid pulses that ended on a half-choked sob and a sigh of surrender.

Patrick sagged on top of him, gasping. The dome light stuttered and went out, leaving them in darkness.

Heartbeats later, hands locked in Patrick's sweaty curls, Pete returned to himself a new man, hazy and gently amazed as he stared up into Patrick's eyes, only barely visible in the distant light from the streetlamp. "I didn't think you--"

Patrick stared down at him, a dazed smile on his face. "I didn't want to be another one of the scene king's one-night conquests." His smile turned sad. "But nobody can resist a royal summons."

"Hey--no, I'd _never_ \--you're so far _out of my league_ , Patrick." Pete squirmed, then shivered at his own over-sensitivity. " _I_ was the one who needed to be worthy of _you_. Make it worth your while to stay." Pete looked away, still uncertain of being so--so exposed. "I originally came out here to get--" He squirmed again, getting his legs tangled in Patrick's while the two of them flopped around like a sea monster on sedatives. With a final _fwoomp!_ he shifted his hips up enough to lift Patrick and himself, then twisted his arm enough to get under his back and pull out the offending thorn of ink (vastly different from his inked thorns) that had been tormenting him for six long months. " _This_ ," he finished with triumph.

The battered notebook's cover was permanently creased. "I know," he started, then bit his lip. 

Patrick shifted to one side and flicked the dome light back on. "What is it?"

Pete stared hard at the notebook full of all his secrets, his weaknesses, his tender parts bruised and battered and carefully pressed between the pages in the form of words he couldn't say out loud. "I know we haven't been hitting all the notes with our new songs," he said. "I thought--don't take this the wrong way, but I've been writing lyrics." He pushed the notebook against Patrick's chest. "I thought we could try them out."

Patrick closed his hand around the notebook. "Pete, this is--I promise I'll keep it safe." 

Patrick licked his lips and this time, Pete couldn't resist and went in for a kiss. "You wouldn't believe how many times I've had to dig that thing or its predecessors out of my back."

Patrick shifted again, this time backing out of the trashed backseat. "Pete, it's a paper notebook. You can't possibly be that delicate."

Pete scooted out after him, and not even the cooling stickiness in his pants could kill the grin on his face. "My royal heinie is a delicate thing that's been abused by notebook spirals and busted pens and suffered all sorts of _indignities_."

"Oh, we haven't gotten to the indignities yet," Patrick murmured.

A distinctly un-royal squeak escaped Pete's lips as they tied jackets around their hips and went back inside to put their kingdom back together.

**

The first few songs with Pete's words are cautious. Patrick layers around the lyrics and camouflages some of the rawness, but Joe is having the time of his life playing the monster guitar riffs he's always loved. Andy starts to come to their shows--the basements at DePaul, the openers on Dime Draft Tuesday nights, the house parties in the inner suburbs. Andy's not alone. The sound guys at the shitty clubs are starting to recognize them as a package deal, even though their drummers rotate out with the life span of fruit flies.

What's important, though, is that the _kids_ are starting to recognize them. They're mouthing the words to the songs, yelling the choruses, call-and-response playing when Pete holds out the microphone. And when Pete falls into them, they bear him up--their king, their monarch--on soft hands and a pillow of shoulders and biceps sending him surfing through the crowd, high on their excitement and high on the music as every note falls into place.

It's Patrick who talks Andy into coming to Joe's house on a warm spring evening. He and Pete have been working on another song. Joe's bought the worlds shittiest van for the royal coach, one step up from a bibbity-bobbited goddamn pumpkin (though Pete's pretty sure the van was dug up out of a potato patch because pumpkins would be an upgrade), and Pete is burning up his cell phone minutes calling every place in the tri-state area with room for more than twenty people and extension cords to book them for shows. By the time Andy shows up, not only do they have a set list, they have a goddamn _tour_.

Patrick starts playing the rhythm guitar parts, filling in the spaces between Joe's power chords. Pete keeps the beat with the bass as they run through their three best songs without a drummer (Bobby had come out of the crowd one night when their scheduled drummer got pulled over for expired plates, and melted back into the crowd just as abruptly) while Andy tapped his foot and listened with a drummer's ear and nodded along.

"This is our new one," Patrick said, so full of nerves Pete could hear it in his voice. 

Pete came over to stand behind Patrick, just letting his presence be felt. He rested his chin on the younger man's shoulder. "You got this, Trick." He brushed his lips against Patrick's neck. 

Patrick opened his mouth. "I'm good to go! But I'm going nowhere fast--"

Pete comes up behind him as Patrick is reaching for the high falsetto at the end of the song and licks his neck. The note comes out a little breathless but he figures Patrick will forgive him. After all, it's good to be the king.

_Saturday_ turns Andy into a convert. He beams at Pete. "You found the missing notes."

Pete's grin was blinding. "Now will you keep our Beat?"

Andy settled behind the kit. "Let's do it. Teach me _Saturday_. Let's make the scene."

Patrick leaned back into Pete, his eyes shining. They still hadn't done much more than heavy making out and rubbing off sessions, but Pete wasn't bothered by it. He knew they had time. The open doors between them were open-ended and they were the kings of all they surveyed.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So there it is. I was going for a mood more than a play-by-play retelling and I hope I've captured that fairytale feeling and the way this band seems perfectly comfortable to dip their collective toes into and out of mythic stories. Comments and kudos feed me. I hope, dear PlatinumandPercocet that you enjoyed this. 
> 
> Another special shout-out to @geminis-garden and @pineapple-likes-panic over on Tumblr (I don't know your names on here) - your moodboards and adorable arts gave me life and brought me smiles and you both are incredibly talented people who deserve the best things.
> 
> Hit me up over on tumblr @glitterandrocketfuel


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